Surrogate Mothers'
New Niche:
Bearing Babies for
Gay Couples
By GINIA BELLAFANTE,
NYTimes on the Web, May 27, 2005
On a spring morning not long ago,
Lura Stiller sat in her stocking feet in a sunny cottage in Cambridge, Mass.,
helping Cary Friedman and his partner, Rick Wellisch, calm their daughter, a
3-month-old in a pink T-shirt.
Ms. Stiller, 34, a homemaker from the Dallas suburbs, likes to say that the
number of gay people in her acquaintance before she met Dr. Friedman, a
psychiatrist, and Dr. Wellisch, an internist, amounted to zero.
"Everything I knew about gay people I knew from TV, which meant that everything
I knew about gay people I learned from 'Will and Grace' and 'The L Word,' " she
said.
In December, Ms. Stiller gave birth to the baby, named Samantha, for Dr.
Friedman and Dr. Wellisch, conceived with a donor egg and the sperm from one of
the partners. (They chose not to know which.) In her decision to
work with them Ms. Stiller is part of a small but growing movement of surrogate
mothers choosing gay couples over traditional families.
As legislatures debate giving gay couples the right to marry -- 14 states have
amended their constitutions to prevent it -- hundreds of couples are finding
ways to create families with or without marriage through surrogates like Ms.
Stiller, who are willing to help them have children genetically linked to them
and to bypass the often difficult legal challenges gay men face in adoption.
The exact number of surrogates who have worked with gay couples is unknown, but
close to half of the 60 or so agencies and law firms around the country that
broker arrangements between surrogate mothers and prospective parents work with
gay couples or are seeking to, through advertising.
Within the close-knit world of professional childbearers, many of whom share
their joys and disillusionments online and in support groups, gay couples have
developed a reputation as especially grateful clients, willing to meet a
surrogate's often intense demands for emotional connection, though the
relationships can give rise to other complications within the surrogate's family
and community.
Many surrogates who choose to work for gay couples say they feel ill equipped or
reluctant to deal with the sense of hopelessness and failure expressed by
married women and men who have struggled unsuccessfully for years to bear
children. Still others are drawn to men as clients because they fear the
possible resentments and jealousies in working so closely with other women.
Surrogates, who are paid about $20,000 above and beyond medical expenses to
carry a child, are responsible for approximately 1,000 births a year, according
to the Organization of Parents Through Surrogacy, a nonprofit group in Gurnee,
Ill., that records births brokered through agencies and privately over the
Internet.
The many surrogates who choose not to work with gay couples frequently cite a
spouse's disapproval or fears that their own children might be stigmatized by
classmates and neighbors. In some instances surrogacy brokers bow to their
own reservations. Ann Coleman, an adoption and surrogacy lawyer in
Greenville, S.C., said she would not pair women with gay couples.
Though she once represented a lesbian couple in a custody suit against their
former husbands, Ms. Coleman said she believed gay couples should pursue
children through adoption, not surrogacy. "I don't know that I'd go to the
extreme to help them do this," she added.
In the last 13 years, Ms. Stiller has had five children: one with her
first husband, two with her current husband and two more as a surrogate.
Her first excursion into the world of surrogacy, for a Florida husband and wife,
left her feeling unappreciated and depleted, she said.
Though the couple visited her in her 18th week of pregnancy and brought gifts
for her children, Ms. Stiller sought a deeper relationship with the intended
mother, a 40-year-old doctor.
"She would call me as if I were working on a project," Ms. Stiller said.
"She wouldn't say: 'Hi, how are you feeling? Are you enjoying the
weather?' Nothing. There was never any chitchat."
In her 37th week, Ms. Stiller experienced early contractions and called the
woman, who drove to Texas right away, but Ms. Stiller remained displeased with
her level of engagement.
"She was here for two and half weeks, and she never made an opportunity to share
in my family," Ms. Stiller said. "It was very important for me to have my
children see that we were helping to create a family, that Mommy wasn't giving
away a brother or a sister."
A friend in the surrogate world suggested she find a gay couple through the
agency Circle Surrogacy.
John Weltman, a Boston lawyer, had a challenging time finding women to carry
children for gay men when he founded Circle Surrogacy a decade ago. Today,
he said, 80 percent of the surrogate mothers who come to him say they would be
willing to work with gay couples, and half prefer to work with gay couples.
In Los Angeles, Growing Generations, a company formed to help gay couples become
parents through egg donation and surrogacy, is responsible for over 300 births,
increasing from four births in 1998 to 108 within the last 17 months.
Dawn Buras, a Pennsylvania mother of four, has been to a fertility clinic in Los
Angeles three times to receive embryonic transplants for a male couple in
Milton, Mass. On each occasion the men accompanied her to the West Coast.
They took adjacent hotel rooms, dined out and visited the set of "Desperate
Housewives." The pregnancy attempts failed, but still the men try,
refusing to work with anyone else.
And Ms. Buras remains committed, and plans to return for another attempt in
June, despite the limitations their efforts have placed on her intimate life.
According to her contract, Ms. Buras cannot have sex with her husband from one
month before the transfer to one month after. Though her husband has been
very supportive, she explained, "I can't say that it doesn't bother him, because
it does."
Nearly all agencies require that surrogates already have children of their own
and that they and their husbands undergo medical and psychological screening to
determine that they can handle the strains surrogacy inevitably levies on
families.
When Ms. Stiller sent her 13-year-old son to school with a strip of pictures of
Samantha and her two fathers in his knapsack, the boy tucked the pictures of the
two men away, worrying that he or the situation itself would be made fun of.
Dr. Hilary Hanafin, the chief psychologist at the Center for Surrogate Parenting
in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Encino, the country's largest surrogacy
agency, said many surrogates with teenage children shy away from working with
gay couples for such reasons. "The mother does not want to show up for a
middle-school track meet and say, 'I'm pregnant for a gay couple,' " Dr. Hanafin
said.
And sometimes relatives cannot withhold their judgments. "I had one
surrogate whose mother-in-law disowned her," said Amy Zaslow, a consultant in
Acton, Mass., to surrogates and prospective parents. "She did not walk
into the house through the entire pregnancy." At Christmas, Ms. Zaslow
said, the woman's children went to their grandmother's house, and she was not
invited along.
Most surrogates today, for heterosexual or gay couples, work as gestational
carriers, meaning they bring children to term but not with their own genetic
material. (Couples availing themselves of surrogacy typically get eggs
from banks where donors are identified by their height, weight, College Board
and I.Q. scores.)
For Ann Nelson, 36, a mother of four in Wheeling, W.Va., an urge toward
surrogacy began to surface in college. The first couple with whom she
tried to work, a man and a woman from New England, asked her to sign a contract
before insemination that stipulated she would eat no processed foods or refined
sugars during her pregnancy.
"I thought, 'Have you ever been to Wheeling, W.Va.?' " said Ms. Nelson, who
decided not to go forward with that couple. "Where was I going to find
these things?
"I knew that surrogacy was not going to be a cakewalk, but I hadn't expected and
wasn't prepared for this level of micromanagement."
She has since borne three children for two gay couples.
The typical surrogate, according to the Center for Surrogate Parenting, is a
woman of 21 to 37, who has had two children and 13 years of formal education.
In many cases, she is motivated by a desire to be pregnant, as well as by a
desire for attention.
Working with gay couples, psychologists say, minimizes the need for a certain
kind of emotional vigilance that can displace the surrogate's own needs from
center stage. "Surrogate mothers who work with heterosexual couples need
to be incredibly sensitive to the loss and trauma that the infertile woman has
suffered," Dr. Hanafin said.
Some surrogates also say they find the sense of defiance in providing gay
couples with children meaningful.
"In all honesty, there's a bit of a rebellious nature in me," acknowledged
Shannon Klein, a mother of three in Cypress, Calif., who home-schools her
children. "I know that there are people who wouldn't approve of being a
surrogate for gay parents, and that has made it more intriguing."
Ms. Klein has borne two children for two gay couples, and she is pregnant with
twins for a third.
"When she initially approached me with this, I said, 'You want to do what?' "
commented Ms. Klein's husband, Mark. "But we've developed friendships with
these people, not fly-by-nights, but lifelong relationships with people we may
never have met otherwise."
Ms. Stiller's visit to Cambridge in March was her second. She made her
first, as a surprise to the future fathers, when she was 35 weeks pregnant, to
reciprocate for the flowers they sent and the visits they made, including one
for her ultrasound test. They cared for her children in Texas while she
recuperated from giving birth to Samantha before Christmas. Seeing the
baby for the first time, she said, "was like seeing the baby of your best
friend."
Dr. Friedman said, "We didn't go into this saying, 'We want an intense
relationship,' but I didn't necessarily expect that we'd develop the bond that
we have."
They will have little competition for Ms. Stiller's affections. She will
be working with no other couples in the future. When her husband, Keith,
returned home last month from Iraq, where he had been stationed for a year, he
told her he did not want her to work as a surrogate again.
"He was concerned for my health and emotional well-being," Ms. Stiller said.
"For a year your life is devoted to someone else's.'
"And physically I think he wanted me to get back to my wonderful size 8."
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